Saturday, July 26, 2014.  Sydney took us to brunch at Monell’s, which is an old house converted into  a restaurant with huge tables.  They seat everyone family style and then just start bringing out  big platters/baskets of food: biscuits, gravy, cinnamon rolls, grits, home fries, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, country ham, pancakes, and fantastic fried chicken, with pitchers of coffee and sweet and unsweet tea, of course.  It’s all you can eat.  I had some of everything except the pancakes (I don’t eat other people’s pancakes).  Then we back to Sydney’s, and she showed us the holes she’s digging in her backyard “to look for treasure.”  She’s already found a buried glass ashtray and two cassette tapes.

We took off from Nashville and then climbed as much as we could to get to cooler temperatures. Scattered clouds were below us. As we approached Terre Haute, we descended below the clouds. The sky was now completely overcast, so we stayed between the clouds and pretty close to the ground. It was hazy, and you couldn’t see the horizon. Berck had me start helping him and Uncle Stacy keeping an eye out for traffic. But we got the airport without any trouble and landed.

 

We decided to stick around at the airport FBO and see if it cleared up at all. Instead, upon the checking the weather, it looked like the weather was just going to get worse and worse over night. Finally, Uncle Stacy called his cousin in Schaumburg to tell him we weren’t going to be getting in there after all that afternoon. Aunt Marisol got us reservations at a Clarion Inn. The FBO said we could borrow the company car as long as we brought it back by 8 a.m. So we piled into the Honda Pilot and headed over to the motel. We all took showers because we’d been hot and sweating all day then headed to Moggy’s Pub for their extensive beer list and the burgers…both were good. We asked our server if there was anything to do in the Haute since were inadvertently stranded here. He shrugged, “Not really. This is a college town. We’ve got three schools here. Drink?”

We continued to check the weather on Uncle Stacy’s iPad. Then we headed back to the hotel to retire. Berck and I went straight to sleep (after Berck checked the weather one more time) only waking up when his alarm went off in the morning. The air-conditioning wasn’t working in Uncle Stacy’s room, so he switched rooms, but his new room’s AC didn’t work much better. Fortunately, we realized we were back in Eastern Time.